A phone rang on a Sunday morning in September 1959. It broke into the joyful chaos that is life with five children between the ages of three and fourteen. It was a phone call she knew was coming, but that fact never does prepare one fully for the reality. It was the phone call that told her that her beloved husband, her soulmate, the father of her children was dead at the age of 38. The brain tumor that had taken his health and vitality, and had even begun to take his personality over the summer, had taken his life.

Breaking into the silence of an empty nest, a phone rang in the summer of 1972. She thought it might be one of her kids calling or perhaps her surgeon husband calling to say he was on his way home. It was the phone call that told her that those swollen lymph nodes she had noti…